I need to get off the street before—
A klaxon rings in the distance and echoes across town. That’s the warning bell right before the shutters open, a courtesy in case people want to make themselves presentable before they’re bathed in light. When I used to hear that bell at home, the time between that sound and the return of the sun felt never-ending, torturous. But now, I realize I have perhaps a couple hundred heartbeats until every window is thrown open and people rush onto the streets.
I can’t go home to my family, not after what we said to each other the last time I saw them. I’ll never make it back to the Gymnasium before the shutters rise, and even if I reached Bianca, she’d have to try to hide me.
I duck into an alley, hide behind garbage, sneak past slatted windows. I realize I’m going in circles, the same five dirty streets over and over. My breath gets more and more ragged. Everywhere I look, factory buildings, warehouses, and tenements turn their backs to me, and then I remember a place where my mom used to go when she was alive. She took me there a few times when I was out of school, and it’s not far. She always said it was her safe place. That was a long time ago, but maybe anyplace that’s truly safe can’t ever disappear.
I follow the route my mother showed me, past a linen warehouse and a chemical plant, along a series of alleys that seem even darker than the other streets around here, and then into a lane that you have to be looking right at, or you’ll miss it.
At the end of that lane, the paving stones of which are a little finer than the worn cobbles of the surrounding streets, there’s a wide, ornate door made of some kind of heavy wood, but painted bright gold with crimson notes and two rows of decorative iron nails. When I reach the door, I almost fall in a dirty heap onto the mat. But I find the hidden buzzer, behind one of the elaborately carved curls of the surrounding wood.
I press, and nothing happens.
The second time I stab at the buzzer, I hear a shrill noise, then a grinding sound of cranks and pulleys, coming from all around me. The shutters are opening. I look back the way I came and see the windows of the building at the end of the lane losing their metal shields, revealing dirty panes with faces behind them.
I ring the buzzer one last time and pound the thick door with my fist, while doorways open and people flock onto the street. I’m trapped here, at the end of this blind alley.
The door swings open, and an elderly man looks down at me. He wears a looser silk tunic, to disguise his paunch, and an old-fashioned cap embroidered with golden thread, to cover his encroaching baldness. But Hernan still has the same kind eyes and wide smile, with a hint of an old pain behind them.
He squints down, and doesn’t recognize me. Then he blinks. “Sophie? Oh dear. What happened to you? You’d better get inside, before people think we’ve started having mud-wrestling in here.”
Hernan doesn’t ask any more questions, just hustles me indoors, past an ornate waiting room that I remember from my mother’s visits, full of dark-stained wood, bright carpets, and slow pendulums. A moment later, we’re in a part of the building that I’ve never seen: the living quarters and service areas. Plain brick walls, cold stone floor. At the end of this hallway, a door opens to reveal a washroom with a big tub.
I try to thank Hernan with what’s left of my voice, and he just smiles. “Tell me all about it when you’re yourself again.” He stoops and fills the tub to the lip with water so hot I breathe steam. Then Hernan leaves, shutting the door behind him, and I drop my blanket.
As soon as the hot water touches my skin, I break apart. Feeling comes back into my fingers and toes, and my skin glows even as I scrape layers of dirt and blood off it. I hyperventilate until I choke, and as the hot water stings all my scrapes and cuts, I let out a long, high-pitched wail. I will never be clean again, never be warm inside. I scrub until I bleed in more places, and I keep scrubbing.
The water turns murky from all the filth that was on my body, and my sinews and veins come back to life, and I finally let myself feel everything that just happened. They took me away. They tore me away from you. You cried and shouted. They paraded me in the street. People threw things. My classmate threw something. They laughed at my fear, like they were hungry for it. They forced me up the mountain, they pushed me into darkness.
As these things go from being “moments that I need to survive right now” to “things that will always have happened to me,” I start to shiver. I feel so chilled that the scalding water might as well be solid ice. Once I start, I can’t make myself stop. The shivers build and build, until water goes all over the floor tiles. I hug myself, and I shed tears that I can’t blame on windburn, and they taste much too pungent, like the tears of a dead person. I hear myself from a tremendous distance, wailing and chattering my teeth.
Just as my own wailing gets too loud for me to bear, and I can’t endure this body, and I feel like I’m going to leave a hundred pieces of myself in this tub, another thought comes, that almost drives out all the others: I was a crocodile, running across the tundra with all of my friends.
PART
TWO
mouth
The Sea of Murder vanished behind them, and then they had nothing but the road. Deathly shroud on one horizon, white furnace on the other. Sky so wide it pulverized you to look up. No other features but the cracks and marbling in the stone underfoot. The rhythm of their footfalls, chump chump chump, became a piece of music that never stopped, accompanied by the sled’s churning wheels. A couple times, a bison charged in from the night and tried to seize a person in its powerful maw, with more teeth than you could count, and razor-sharp threads crisscrossing between them. Once, a storm fell from a great height and set upon them, knives of rocky ice clutched in a million fists. They had to build their shelter though they could barely stand, and hug each other as they shielded the sled with their trembling bodies. At last, though, when they seemed to have walked a dozen lifetimes, they saw a glow on the horizon: the lights of Xiosphant. The lights grew prouder and then vanished, because the city was having its curfew. When the lights reappeared, they looked much closer.
Everyone cheered at the thought of unloading their cargo, unlacing muck-stiffened boots, finding a lukewarm bath, eating hot food. Except for Mouth, who felt a rising dread at the thought of being trapped inside a city again.
The other members of the Resourceful Couriers were city people who traveled for a living. Mouth was a born traveler, who tolerated cities for brief periods.
In a city, you could only walk in circles. Trouble knew where to find you. People lived with more things than they could carry, and they pretended that built structures were geographical features. Mouth couldn’t travel alone, and the Resourceful Couriers were the closest you could find to a gang of nomads in this age, but the long drags between trips were torture. Especially in Xiosphant, where the residents were obsessed with making sure you slept at the right time, and they didn’t even know how to make decent coffee.
Maybe Mouth would get lucky and the whole city would fall into a chasm before they reached it.